Leadership Thought #307 – Never Become Too Important To Your Business

Your business should be able to run reasonably well without you. I’ve met (and coached) many business owners through the years who admit that if something happened to them, the company would have a tough time continuing operations for any extended period. This situation always makes me nervous. Leadership isn’t about building dependency on any one person. It is about getting a group of people to work together toward a common goal. Of course, it’s much harder to do this when you are small. Still, as you begin to grow and add staff, you should be constantly thinking about building operational redundancy and minimizing personnel/performance risk.

The best thing you can do for an employee is to teach him/her to think for themselves rather than do the work for them. People grow by solving their problems and taking on additional responsibility. Everyone’s role and responsibilities should be clear, and they should understand the big picture and how all the various parts of the company fit together. In addition, training programs should be in place to ensure that all employees are regularly sharpening their skills and growing their business acumen. Instead of worrying about whether people can do their jobs, focus your energy on creating a business environment that encourages individual initiative.

It’s tricky for a leader to minimize and focus on their role while growing the role of others. Being the key player provides a certain level of personal validation. If everything runs through you, there is this flawed sense of control that initially feels comforting. However, you can’t successfully grow a business this way. As you try to multitask through every issue, things will quickly get out of hand. If you create a culture of dependency, people will wait for your input before doing anything important, and you can’t be everywhere. A long-term strategy of individual leader hyper-performance only leads to increased stress, growing fatigue, reactive decision-making, and uneven accountability. If you are not careful, you will become the biggest obstacle to your own success.

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• Cultivate Employees to Grow Your Company (score.org)
• 5 Leadership Lessons from Successful Small Business Owners (openforum.com)
• 10 Traits of a Successful Small Business Owner: Do You Have What It Takes? (choosewhat.com)
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